Paul Lewton
64 years old
Former lecturer English literature - University of Warwick, Islamic University of Omdurman, Sudan. Teacher of English now retired; volunteer worker with asylum seekers and refugees. Run food project for destitute asylum seekers.
Eyeless in Gaza
Devils are magical, infantile.
They can turn fear into fear
Dispossession into repossession
Amnesia into alibi
Scripture into wall
Sonic boom into wake up call
Taunts into falling snow
Lorries into donkeys
Children into thrown stones
Solomon's song into phosphorous bombs
A nation into a living room with no front door.
وجهات نظر / Points of View
وجهات نظر / Points of View
Looking as far as the big house,
you can see the gardens and blue skies.
Looking from the big house,
you can see as far as the protecting wall.
Zooming in from the blue skies you see - that's
us! - the other side.
We will leave Iraq a better place
We will leave Iraq a better place
(Lieutenant-General John Cooper)
One day you will die
bringing ruin to your household
followed by a recovery of sorts (is that what you say?)
According to a conservative estimate (isn’t that what they say?)
there are six hundred thousand of us dead
some died in natural ways
heart attacks from bomb blasts
untreated cancers from hospitals as rubble
the rest mutilated in the usual ways
You will recover as you always do
and our living will copy you
our living (can you hear what I say?)
cats matter
it’s silly to write about cats when there’s Iraq
until you think of the cats in Iraq
humans is easier –
six hundred thousand dead at least, so reckon a million plus
how many of them had cats?
how many cats went to bits with their owners?
does it matter?
what is the status of cats in Iraq?
do the Iraqis even care?
(I bet they do. I bet their children do.)
is it different in the Sudan (another killing ground)?
my Darfuri friend doesn’t like our cat creeping to him
(why else would the cat be creeping to him?)
but when we were in Khartoum all those years ago
the caretaker of the flats (between bouts of piffpaffing cockroaches)
fed the neighbourhood cats stewed sheep bones
bones the cats would rapidly internalise
making for a balance
which really matters
because in the Sudan cats wear their skeletons on the outside.
Military Music
Before the First World War ruined it all
(trench warfare, rheumatoid arthritis as common as gas,
dying at a walking pace)
you ran into war to stop yourself running away from it
and being shot.
Music could help you do this.
Haydn would be asking too much
his military symphony was for the concert hall
(hellish roar...horrid sublimity etc.)
but drum and fife yes, to fright you to fight
(and the other side too, or no contest).
And if you managed to crawl back from the day’s battle
a slow march would do nicely
a rehearsal for the cathedral requiem
for those who couldn’t crawl
attended by stuffed shirts impressed by sombre sounds.
Mercy Mercy Me
I read the news today , oh boy
two things took my breath away
(not literally, it’s just a figure of speech
where I live it’s understood that way).
The first was Gerry Adams, of Sinn Fein
the IRA’s political wing
(but always at arm’s length from the IRA
in a manner of speaking).
He gives “a personal view of Jesus”
hot footing it (another metaphor)
in Jordan,Palestine and Israel for Channel 4.
“I do know that after decades of war
we all have plenty to forgive and be forgiven for.”
The other was Michael Mates senior Tory on the ISC
- Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee -
accused of being “a mouthpiece for MI5”
itself accused of collusion with “those two dreadful men”
- Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney -
with Binyam Mohamed left more dead than alive
( I mean this literally).
The only mistake MI5 had made
was ”being a little slow” to understand
their American cousins had authority
for torture lite (literal? metaphorical? beats me!).
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